St Tropez's double life

St Tropez is both maddening and endearing – a party town and a peaceful
village. As it prepares to pay tribute to its patron saint, Anthony
Peregrine explores the contradictions of Europe’s most famous seaside resort.

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St Tropez's festival of Les Bravades celebrates the days of 'heroism and fidelity' - long before Brigitte Bardot came along

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Natural beauty is the perhaps the foundation of St Tropez's appeal

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'So what if the views are nice, George Clooney was here last summer and Russian models get sprayed with Krug?'Photo: CORBIS

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'Next door to the woman in a housecoat sweeping her steps is a yacht charter company, an outpost of Sotheby's or one of the village's 80 estate agencies'

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'The port turns out to be more remarkable than at first sight. Yachts the size of Shropshire and as sleek as suppositories yell: "Look at me" in unison'

It can take two hours or more to drive the last couple of miles into St Tropez. That's enough time to build up quite a head of hate. You may seethe at your passengers and the zillion other cars and the stupid scooters weaving in and out, and the OAPs with walking frames overtaking you.

Then you will resent St Tropez itself for getting you into this sorry jam. So what if the views are nice, George Clooney was here last summer and Russian models get sprayed with Krug? So what if the self-glorifying little place has "colourful historical traditions" (the biggest of which is imminent; more of that in a moment, when we've calmed down)? So what, indeed. You're moving a yard a minute. You could be at home watching the darts.

Then you arrive and, glory be, find a parking space, and you're in a foul mood, and things don't get much better. At first sight, the most famous seaside resort in Europe looks pretty damned ordinary. It's got a nice big square, quaint little streets and a port – but so do a hundred other Mediterranean villages.

So, and I recommend this, you pop into the church for solace and inspiration. You can't miss it. Its ochre-pink and yellow tower is familiar from a torrent of postcards. Move to the left of the altar, where there is a bust of St Tropez himself. If it comes as a surprise to learn there really was a chap called Tropez (or Torpes, or Torpetius in the original Latin), it is more of one to discover that he was a ringer for Borat: same long face, similar moustache, same expression of startled disgust, same extravagant taste in outerwear.

If you're anything like me, this will appease you no end. But don't mention it, especially not right now. True Tropeziens regard their saint with unusual fervour – and never more so than tomorrow, Monday and Tuesday, when he is the focal point of the village's biggest annual thrash, Les Bravades.

Outsiders might consider St Tropez (the place) a little frothy. Insiders consider themselves rooted folk with a history of "heroism and fidelity". The self-image goes back to the 15th and 16th centuries, when St Tropez was effectively self-governing, had its own militia and fought off all manner of bad guys.

Which probably explains why its commemoration is so serious. Locals dress up in period uniforms and other appropriate costume, parade St Tropez (the bust) around the village and fire rifles and muskets at well-defined moments. Quite a few of them. They blast off half a ton of gunpowder over the two days. If you're in the area and planning to go tomorrow, do not, incidentally, applaud the spectacle. It's utterly infra dig, like clapping the coronation. The days of "heroism and fidelity" ended when Louis XIV ended the port's tax-free independence. Not much happened after that, until the painter Paul Signac sailed there in the late 19th century. He liked the spot and stayed. Other artists followed, and they kept on coming. By the Fifties, St Tropez was a summer extension of St Germain-des-Près. Or parts of it were. The likes of Juliette Gréco and Boris Vian brought jazz and a certain friskiness to the famous Bar de la Ponche. Sartre brought the existentialism plus, as Simone Duckstein (now owner of Ponche Hotel, then a little girl) recalls, a pot belly and "dead-fish look behind enormously thick glasses".

Meanwhile, Picasso sipped his pastis on the terrace, "his eyes deep black, seeming to capture everything as only a ferocious animal knows how". Then, wham, Brigitte Bardot's appearance in And God Created Woman transformed localised libertinage into a worldwide reputation for illicit pleasures.

The place never looked back. The gendarmes in St Tropez films (like the Carry On series, but in French) cemented the celebrity, despite being as funny as sinus trouble. Crowds accumulated. Immediately and inevitably, voices arose claiming that the real St Tropez was finished. As early as the mid-Fifties, the writer Françoise Sagan was saying that the place had become "nothing but mattresses-for-hire". The resort was apparently finished before, for most people, it had even begun.

In recent times, the charge has grown louder. St Tropez is killed off annually. But that depends on what you mean by dead. Naturally, it's no longer the sole preserve of jazz-loving bohemians. How could it be? There aren't any left. But dead?

Well, take a closer look at those charming little streets, pastel-coloured and two donkeys wide. Next door to the woman in a housecoat sweeping her steps is a yacht charter company, an outpost of Sotheby's or one of the village's 80 estate agencies. Across from the corner grocery store, the said woman may continue her weekly shopping at Dior. Rues Allard and Gambetta may be the only village streets in the world featuring every single brand name you ignore in glossy hotel magazines. You're expecting the butcher's, you get Louis Vuitton.

Out on Pampelonne Beach – St Tropez's hottest, three-mile strip of sand (though it's actually in the neighbouring commune of Ramatuelle) – 20 or more private beaches offer hundreds of loungers for those who like to sunbathe in military formation. In the beach bars, it's all champagne-doused dancing, Bono, bikini-free bimbos and lunch at £50 a throw.

Back in town, the port turns out to be more remarkable than at first sight. Yachts the size of Shropshire and as sleek as suppositories yell: "Look at me" in unison. (As well they might. Mooring charges rise to £1,100 a day.) Throngs oblige, up to 100,000 a day in summer.

They might also spot Jacques Chirac sipping on a port-side terrace. He quite often does. "People wouldn't come if the yachts weren't there, and the yachts wouldn't come if the people weren't there. They want to be seen," says Claude Maniscalco, head of the tourist board.

Getting across to the central Place des Lices, with its plane trees and pétanque players, entails breasting a flood of luxury limousines. "I've noticed even the taxis are Jaguars," says John Morrell, on holiday from Lancaster. You'd better believe St Tropez looks after these motors. They tailor the speed bumps to the clearance levels of the latest models.

So it seems that reports of St Tropez's death are an exaggeration. Visitor figures didn't dip at all in 2009, as they did elsewhere on the Côte-d'Azur. "Of course St Tropez isn't what it was," Maniscalco says. "It has evolved. If it hadn't, it really would be dead. But look around you. It's extraordinary – a small village with the services of a capital city." And, despite what you've heard, the rich and famous can't keep away. I have before me photographs of Liam Neeson, P Diddy, Liz Hurley and Michael Schumacher, all snapped recently in various bits of the resort. George Clooney favours the Villa Romana, an Italian restaurant in the middle of a housing estate. Kylie Minogue was at La Ponche Hotel not long ago.

So, on a different occasion, was Jack Nicholson. He stepped out into the tiny street for a cigarette. The owner, Simone Duckstein, followed him for a chat. Passers-by started taking photographs. "We'll have to go back inside," Nicholson told Mme Duckstein, rather sweetly. "You're beginning to attract attention."

That's a point. The people from the People Pages no longer saunter about quite so freely as in the Sixties and Seventies. If they did, they would be smothered. But they are still there, in the smart hotels and the fancy villas woven into the wooded hillsides behind. And such presence is evidently enough.

"Even if you don't see Jennifer Aniston or gorgeous George, you still feel you've been rubbing shoulders with the glitterati," said John Morrell, a Lancastrian. "It's part of the magic." Alongside showbiz is real biz. Mohamed Al-Fayed is a fan, and French tycoons such as Vincent Bolloré tack in by the yachtful. They meet for villa soirées, in the Club 55 on the beach or the Byblos hotel's Caves du Roy nightclub. "Under cover of partying, they're really working, making connections," says Byblos's manager, Christophe Chauvin. ("That's what I tell my wife," I reply. "How do these guys get away with it?")

And then there is any amount of international flotsam and jetsam, people arriving in St Tropez because people arrive in St Tropez. It's a spectacular, self-sustaining bubble. And, like the traffic jam, it can truly get on the nerves as everything resolves into an obsession with style. On several occasions I have wished that I could rise up and smite all the designer fol-de-raddle, the reduction of life's concerns to a truly innovative DJ mix, a ground-breaking cocktail experience or a brilliant new way with Japanese finger food.

There are so many in-places of Tropezien nightlife that the dedicated airhead must be in a permanent tizzy of indecision. "We're surviving the crunch!" a woman told me in a very hip bar. She was hefting a bottle of champagne that had cost someone £1,500. She would, I'm sure, have survived anything except a strike at Armani. The only time I went to the Caves du Roy (undisputed in-place for 40 years), my problem wasn't getting in: I was with the boss. It was getting out again, and as quickly as possible, without seeming impolite.

Then, as it has annoyed me, so St Tropez itself calms me down again. It's always doing that. After escaping the nightclub cacophony, I sat in the relative calm of the Byblos bar terrace, moonlight above, swimming pool before and cognac to hand. And I thought: "Yes, well. OK." The thing is that the well-heeled, scarcely dressed, hare-brained excess is vital to keeping St Tropez in the planetary spotlight. But it's only the sheen. It obscures a multilayered life, from villa evenings with moguls through to the old fellow going to the fish market with his basket. Or putting on a 16th-century uniform and firing off a musket.

And the village remains a village, if an odd one. Rich people from Paris's 16th arrondissement, São Paulo and St Petersburg play at being villagers, even as they hurry to Dolce & Gabbana. Stars do emerge from hiding. Some play boules with local boulistes, who are impressed only if the guy is any good at boules. Then they might repair to the Café-des-Arts, boulistes' HQ and the only French bar I know that is ignoring the no-smoking edict.

Insouciance, in short, remains because people think St Tropez should be insouciant, and thus it is so. "Millionaires leave off their shirts and ties and wear T-shirts here, which they don't do in Cannes or Monaco," says Christophe Chauvin of the Byblos. "And the luxury boutiques don't have security men, as elsewhere. They'd have an impossible job – deciding whether the bloke in shorts was a Brazilian billionaire or just a bloke in shorts."

Duckstein says: "St Tropez is a very tolerant village, and it generates complicity. Contact is easier. You can meet people you would never meet usually."

You might, for instance, be having a drink on the Senequier bar-terrace, the most venerable of many by the port, and you'll start chatting to a chap and, a little later, you're dancing till dawn on his yacht. "Happens all the time," Chauvin says. Especially, I assume, if you're blonde with an interesting décolleté.

On the other hand, you might go slightly off-centre to La Ponche mini-district, which looks like what it is: the old fishermen's quarter preserved in far better nick than it ever was when working. The tight scrum of old village buildings gives on to a tiny beach. With the bay and Maures mountains beyond, this is the stuff of tranquillity.

Further along is the shore-side maritime cemetery, where the film director Roger Vadim rests after a life with, among others, Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve and Jane Fonda. Few live people have livelier lives. Few dead people have better views. Continue and the headland gets rougher, rocks and trees dropping to the sea. Bardot's own place, and private beach, is nearby.

Other villas emerge half-hidden, lending a sumptuous, secretive subtext to considerable elemental grandeur. But the 14-mile coastal path is public and there are beaches-for-all along the track – relatively overlooked because they are less accessible and less notorious than Pampelonne.

They are pretty good, too. Duckstein reckons that such natural beauty is the foundation of St Tropez's appeal. More than that, she is convinced that the place has a particular energy field "propitious to harmony and creation". That's what started the St Tropez ball and has kept it rolling. It may not look that way at 5am in the Papagayo nightclub, but remember three things: (a) the walk you took around the headland with a loved one (b) the fact that, for all the crowds and erratic partying, St T has ridiculously few policemen and (c) Mme Duckstein knows St Tropez better than anyone.

At any event, I leave the thought with you. You may ponder it on the drive out of town back to the normal world. You've got another two hours, minimum.

Getting there

You should really arrive by yacht or chopper but, if you're worried that's a little showy, fly Ryanair (0871 246 0000; www.ryanair.com) from Stansted to Toulon-Hyères. It's 50 minutes to the outskirts, then the jam. Marseilles and Nice airports are farther away (2h and 1h30 respectively) but are served by most low-cost carriers.

Staying there

There are some 60 hotels in and around St Tropez. None are cheap. La Ponche, rue des Remparts (0033 494 970253; www.laponche.com; doubles from £218 low season, £281 high), was a fisherman's bar and is now a four-star but remains the resort's atmospheric living memory. Mick and Bianca were married at the Byblos, Avenue Paul Signac (0033 494 566800; www.byblos.com; doubles from £360pn for a two-night stay).

Just off-centre, the British-owned Pastis Hotel, 61 Ave Paul Signac (0033 498 125600; www.pastis-st-tropez.com; doubles from £159 low, £409 high), has much more contemporary Provençal style than you would expect from the outside. And Le Mouillage, Port du Pilon (0033 494 975319; www.hotelmouillage.fr; doubles from £91 low, £204 high), is a good bet in what passes for St Tropez's budget range.

Bardot show

St Tropez city fathers have at last got around to organising a Brigitte Bardot exhibition. It charts her life from 16-year-old local lass to most beautiful woman in the world and the animal kingdom's best friend. Espace Rendez-Vous des Lices, June 23- October 31, £10.